Category: philosophy of cosmology

“In Anthropology a cosmology is an analytical construct but above all it is an object of study, and it can be defined as a set of knowledge, beliefs, interpretations and practices of a society or culture related to explanations about the origins and evolution of the universe as well as the role and the meaning of humans, life, and the world, within the universe or cosmos. A cosmology involves explanations of the past, present and future of a society, and these explanations are part of its understanding of cosmo-eco-ethnogenesis, and it deals with the origins as well as with the finality and destiny of humans and of other forms of existence.
If cosmology in Physics and Astronomy is a science for specialized researchers who study the origins and evolution of the universe and these specialists construct an interpretative framework for what is called a scientifically-based cosmology, thus, when using the word ‘cosmology’ we are dealing with two different approximations, one from Physics and Astronomy that refers to cosmology as a science or as a scientific process, and another one from Anthropology that usually defines cosmology as an object and as a socio-cultural phenomenon produced by all societies. Thus a cosmologist from Physics studies the universe; and an Anthropologist studies a cosmology.”

“If you go back to the different theories of cosmic evolution in the early 1990s, the data we’ve gathered in the last decade has eliminated all of them save one, a model that you might think of today as the consensus model. This model involves a combination of the Big Bang model as developed in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s; the inflationary theory, which Alan Guth proposed in the 1980s; and a recent amendment that I will discuss shortly. This consensus theory matches the observations we have of the universe today in exquisite detail. For this reason, many cosmologists conclude that we have finally determined the basic cosmic history of the universe.But I have a rather different point of view, a view that has been stimulated by two events.”